Cousin Once Removed

by Gerald Hammond

  ‘How are you mending?’ Wallace asked.

  ‘Slowly. I wouldn’t want to run a mile yet.’ Keith was frowning.

  ‘Don’t worry, it may never happen.’

  That was exactly what was worrying Keith. He stayed silent.

  ‘You’ll be f-fit for the twelfth?’ Wallace asked.

  ‘Come hell or high water.’

  Molly, who had come to the french windows to investigate the sound of voices, made a derisory noise. ‘If he’s fit to do more than sit in a Land Rover,’ she said, ‘I’ll believe in miracle healing.’

  Keith had made up his mind that he could heal if he tried hard enough. He ignored her. ‘All well at the shop?’ he asked.

  Wallace nodded. ‘Well enough. The usual preseason flurry. And I got rid of that Spanish gun you said nobody but a hairy idiot would buy.’

  ‘Who bought it?’

  ‘F-funnily enough, a hairy idiot. Keith, we’ve got a problem. With you being out of action, I’ve been turning away repair jobs. But while I was out of the shop, Minnie Pilrig went and accepted one from a man from Bonnyrig. He said he was taking his wife away for a few days’ break, so we can’t give it back. And Minnie says he was desperate to get the chequering re-cut and the barrels re-finished because he’s got an invitation to Lord Moran’s shoot on the twelfth and it’s the only gun he ever hits anything with. Shall I run it into Edinburgh?’

  ‘We can’t afford to spend time and petrol sending business to our rivals,’ Keith said. ‘What make is it?’

  ‘It says McSwale & Angus on the rib.’

  ‘Nothing valuable, then. You’ve helped me blue enough barrels. Have a go. If you balls it up we can always do it again together.’

  ‘I wouldn’t trust myself to re-cut chequering,’ Wallace said.

  ‘You won’t have to. I’ve never seen chequering worn away, except on a keeper’s gun that was carried every day. It’ll be bunged up with the snot and dandruff of a bygone age. Give it a good scrub with Janet’s toothbrush.’

  ‘All right,’ Wallace said unhappily. ‘I’ll have a go. Are you any nearer to finding out who spiked you?’

  Molly came away from the french windows and sat down. This was more important than shoptalk.

  ‘I think so,’ Keith said. He started to rearrange the enlargements. ‘I’ve started from the assumption that somebody picked us up around Riberac, followed us and then dropped hitch-hikers in front of us at least once. And somebody else may have followed us all the way to the boat. I’ve been looking at the cars in Molly’s photographs, and I spent yesterday evening dating them. I was looking for cars, preferably British, which don’t show up until after that piece appeared in The Scotsman, and then show up in the right sort of places, and which I think I remember having seen on the way north.

  ‘Now, here’s a bit of a shot of the square at Riberac when we went to the market there. It’s taken from about outside that café with the crash loo, Molly. See the red outline on it? Here’s a pull-up of that bit.’

  Molly took the second enlargement out of his hand. ‘That’s fine-grain film,’ she said, ‘and you’ve pulled it up until the grain looks like BB shot, but it’s as sharp as a needle. Shows what a steady hand I’ve got.’

  ‘And I wasn’t clumping around in the dark-room. Didn’t have the strength. See that car there?’

  Molly looked where his pencil was pointing. ‘The Capri?’

  ‘Right. Now, while we were on the road home, somewhere before Angoulême, I remember seeing a shit-coloured Capri in the mirror –’

  ‘What colour?’

  ‘– a brown Capri, with one of those green plastic strips over the windscreen. You know what I mean, they say “Charles and Diana”, or whatever. I was reading it backwards just before it overtook us, but it caught my attention. It said “Engaged” over the driver and “Vacant” in front of the passenger’s seat.’

  ‘He’d be a bloody fool to leave that on.’

  ‘That’s what I thought,’ Keith said. ‘He probably took off his spotlamps and dangling dollies which might have helped to make the car memorable, but he’d been looking at the sunstrip so long he’d stopped seeing it.’

  Molly was busy with the magnifier. ‘I think it says what you said, but it’s right at the limit of definition and you can’t make out the number. Without any colour. . . .’

  ‘In a way,’ Keith said, ‘it helps having them in black-and-white. Look at this one. We stopped in Verteillac on the way back and you took this shot from outside the Crédit Agricole while I was cashing a cheque inside.’

  Molly studied the new photograph under the magnifier while Wallace tried to peer over her shoulder. ‘It could be the same car,’ she said, ‘but you can only see the last two letters on the sunthing.’

  ‘But it ends in N.T. How many names can you think of?’

  ‘Charley and Aunt,’ said Wallace.

  ‘That’s about all. And the number-plate’s clear and sharp.’

  ‘You’re only guessing that it’s the same car,’ Molly said.

  ‘I would be,’ Keith said. ‘But did you notice the girl standing beside the tree?’

  ‘I didn’t,’ Molly said, ‘but you’d be bound to.’

  ‘Remember our hitch-hiker? That’s why I said that the lack of colour might be a blessing. She was blonde when we picked her up. The girl with the camera up at Foleyhill was red-haired. The day we got back here, I was doing some shopping. A red-haired girl looked into the shop window, and later a brunette drove past in a brown Capri. I think they were all one and the same lassie. She could have had several different colours of those nylon wigs, and if she swapped them around and changed her sunglasses now and again who’d recognize her? A girl with long hair, the hair-colour’s the first thing you notice.’

  ‘Second,’ Molly said.

  ‘True. But when you’ve seen one – two, I mean – you’ve seen them all. Then you get around to the face later on.’

  Molly was scowling through the magnifier. ‘It could be her.’

  ‘Now.’ Keith changed photographs again. ‘This is from a different frame, same place, same time, adjacent on the film. See the lad by the phone-box? It looks like the man who met me and took me up Foleyhill. I ought to be sure, but I’m not. I hardly looked at his face, he’d got me too interested in looking around.’

  ‘Keith,’ Molly said sharply. ‘Do you remember? After we’d picked up the girl –?’

  ‘The hitch-hiker? The second one, who turned away about when he could see that the girl was in our car? I was wondering about that.’

  Wallace removed the photographs and the magnifier from Molly’s determined grasp. ‘If there were two hitch-hikers there must have been a driver as well,’ he said.

  ‘But we didn’t see him.’

  ‘Perhaps you didn’t, but I may’ve seen him. And,’ Wallace said suddenly, ‘I think I d-did.’ He laid his finger on the first photograph. A round-faced young man, in jeans and a T-shirt which proclaimed that he had undergone a vasectomy, was buying a loaf off a market stall. Either he was below average size or the lady in charge of the stall was enormous – possibly, Keith thought, both. ‘That lad, or one damn like him, was in the shop and asking where you two had gone. And this other lad, the one you say may have been a hitch-hiker and may have taken you up to Foleyhill. . . . Keith, you remember the day you got back. We were talking in the shop, and a man came in and looked at trout rods. You had your back to him most of the time, but I saw his face. That’s him.’

  ‘And I was in the process of telling you that all the guns were coming over by coaster,’ Keith said bitterly. ‘I didn’t name the boat, did I?’

  ‘Not that I remember. I wonder whether these are all the same bunch,’ Wallace said. ‘If your car was done twice there must’ve been two different lots. Wouldn’t they have bumped into each other?’

  ‘Possibly,’ said Keith. ‘But we don’t know that they both got to Riberac at the same time. I mind that we had the timetable of the Diepp
e sailings lying around on the back seat for a while. Anybody who saw that might have waited for us at Dieppe.’

  They shuffled the stacks of photographs. Molly picked up another shot of Riberac, taken a few days before the others. ‘There’s a dark Jag. . . . This was the day we lunched at the Chêne Vert, and it’s parked further up the same street as if the driver’s watching for us coming out of the hotel. There was a dark blue Jag. of the same model – well, it looked the same to me – a few cars behind us in the queue for the boat at Dieppe.’

  They puzzled over the photographs, but without extracting any more information from them, until Wallace said that he had to go. Molly elected to walk with Wallace to his car. From the corner of the house they looked back to the sun-trap, where Keith was either deep in thought or falling asleep. His hand dangled in the playpen and Deborah was earnestly counting his fingers, watched by the jealous young labrador and the complacent old spaniel. Wallace sighed. He and Janet yearned for a child of their own, so far without success although, as Janet said, it was fun trying. ‘It must be wonderful to have a bairn,’ Wallace said.

  ‘It used to be,’ Molly said. ‘Having two of them can get a bit much at times.’

  Wallace nodded. He knew exactly what she meant.

  Chapter Six

  Keith came partially out of his reverie. Leaving Deborah and the dogs to their own devices, he made his way to his study and phoned the police. Sergeant Ritchie was on duty and came to the phone.

  ‘Dougie?’ Keith said. ‘Keith Calder here. I want a favour. Would you rather call me back?’

  ‘Aye. I’ll do that.’

  A few minutes later the phone rang and Keith heard the succession of rapid pips which denotes a coin-box. ‘What favour?’ Ritchie’s voice asked.

  ‘First off,’ Keith said, ‘I want to trace an owner from a car number.’

  ‘I couldn’t be doing a thing like that,’ Ritchie said. ‘It wouldn’t do at all. These things are terrible confidential and private.’ There was silence for a few seconds. ‘How would you like to see over the new building?’ he asked.

  ‘I’d be very interested,’ Keith said.

  ‘Quarter to twelve the morn, be in the square near your shop.’

  ‘Right,’ Keith said. He broke the connection and dialled again. He wanted Ronnie’s services as chauffeur.

  *

  Ten minutes before noon the next day, Sergeant Ritchie’s rosy face appeared at the door of Ronnie’s Land Rover. He opened the door and climbed up, puffing gently because his initially broad form had been spreading over the years. Keith humped himself painfully on to the middle seat.

  ‘Up towards your cottage, Ronnie,’ Ritchie said. ‘But keep going right-handed.’ He guided them on to new tarmac and round the bulk of the new police building. Scaffolding was being dismantled, and painters were cleaning the warning labels off the windows. They parked between contractors’ vehicles.

  ‘Come when I give you a wave,’ Ritchie said. He fumbled for the latch, clambered out and trudged across the tarmac to a side-door. A younger constable came out and hurried off. Ritchie waved and they walked over to join him.

  ‘I’m relieving him while he gets his dinner,’ Ritchie said. ‘This way I can show you around, and nobody the wiser. The thing is, the builders are supposed to be finished but they’ve gone late. And there were sub-contracts that couldn’t be stopped and deliveries that had to be made. Like the new terminals to the Police National Computer.’

  ‘That’s what you’re guarding?’ Keith asked.

  Ritchie shook his head. ‘Who’d want to steal that sort of thing? It’s the booze, man. This bit here, the staff club, came into use last week. And all the champagne for the open ceremony turned up. And with the place empty but for the builder lads. . . .’

  ‘That figures. I never tasted champagne,’ Ronnie said.

  ‘You’re not tasting it now,’ Ritchie said. He led them into a large room. One end was fitted out as a bar. ‘You called at just the right time or I couldn’t have helped you. There’s a purge on about unauthorized access to the computer. Seems one of the highheidyins did a spot-check. He wondered why one of the stations in the city had called up a list of all the local tarts. The station syndicate had just had a win on the pools, and it turned out that they were having a celebration stag party. Now the tapes for every day are collected for checking, and the Lord help you if you’ve no good reason for the questions you’ve asked the computer.’

  ‘Well, then –’

  ‘But the new gear, the terminals in this building, they’re in and working but there’s nobody to see what gets wiped off the recording tapes. Come through this way.’

  ‘Somebody should stay here on guard,’ Ronnie said. ‘I’ll do it.’

  ‘Oh no you don’t,’ Ritchie said firmly. ‘You just come along with me.’

  ‘He’s used those words before,’ Keith said.

  Ritchie unbolted a pair of doors and led them into an internal corridor which, unlike the clubroom, was functionally decorated and still showed signs of missing finishes. Near to the front of the building he turned into a severe-looking office equipped with four computer consoles, a supervisor’s desk with monitors, automatic wall-displays and all the paraphernalia of space-age police work. He threw some switches at the supervisor’s desk and took his seat at a console. ‘What do you want to know?’ he asked.

  ‘Fawn Capri,’ Keith said. He put down a slip of paper beside Ritchie. ‘This number. Who owns it?’

  ‘No problem.’ Keith watched carefully as Ritchie keyed the console. ‘Valerie Duguidson, Hawthorns, Bonnyrigg.’

  ‘Miss or Mrs?’

  ‘Miss. Could she have married since the last time she taxed her car?’

  ‘For all I’d know,’ Keith said. He remembered that there had been a slight facial resemblance between the girl and the young man who had met him at Foleyhill. ‘Does she have a brother?’

  ‘Ring her up and ask her. There’s no way I can tell from here.’

  ‘You can call up things like criminal records and firearms certificates, can’t you?’

  ‘I wouldn’t know his name.’

  ‘Duguidson’s an uncommon name. Call them all up.’

  Ritchie thought about it. ‘I could,’ he said. ‘But you two stand well back. Some of this is gey confidential.’ When Ronnie and Keith were well out of range he keyed the console again. ‘Two Duguidsons,’ he said. ‘One of them lives over in the west and does credit card frauds, but the other . . . you’ve hit it. Hugh Duguidson, same address as the lassie. Nothing serious. He swatted one of our men with a placard during a demo at Torness and then got himself in contempt of court. That all you want?’

  ‘What else can you find out?’

  Ritchie began keying in to different programs. ‘Neither of them wanted . . . not disqualified drivers . . . no shotgun or firearms certificates . . . no licence to keep explosives . . . no . . . that’s about the lot.’

  ‘Brian Batemore,’ Keith said. ‘What kind of car does he have?’

  ‘Yon lad that was up at the hospital because somebody used his name? Come on, now, Keith. That’s the Shadow Home Secretary’s son.’

  ‘Stepson.’

  ‘After the next election, his dad could be my boss’s boss’s boss’s boss.’

  ‘For God’s sake,’ Keith said, ‘You’re Scottish Office, not Home Office. I’m not asking for anything confidential. He drives around in it.’ Behind Ritchie’s back, he made a face at Ronnie.

  ‘Anyway,’ Ritchie said, ‘it doesn’t work that way round. Give it a number and it’ll tell you who owns the car. But you can’t just put in the owner’s name.’ He fumbled through a typed booklet. ‘I don’t think so,’ he added uncertainly.

  ‘Try it,’ Keith suggested.

  ‘No, I’m trying no experimentation with this thing. I might wipe its memory out, and then think what a stishie there’d be.’

  Keith could think of more than one acquaintance who would be glad if that
were to happen. He leaned over Ritchie’s shoulder. ‘Just out of interest,’ he said, ‘just a hypothetical question. If you wanted to wipe the memory clean, how would you set about it?’

  ‘You’d do it too, you bleeder.’ Ritchie suddenly noticed Ronnie’s absence. ‘Where’s he gone?’

  ‘I think he wandered back-the-way.’

  Ritchie took off like a lurcher going after a hare. Keith settled himself at the console. He was no expert on computers, but it was his experience, gained from the mini-computer and the word processor that he and Wallace used for the business, that many computers could perform functions which the original programmer had never dreamed of. He had watched Ritchie with care and had digested the salient part of the procedures over Ritchie’s shoulder from the instruction-book. There was nothing abstruse about them. The methodology was clear-cut. Starting from the question, ‘How would I wish to be addressed if I were a computer?’ Keith began keying in. The computer responded with dumb insolence, or by flashing up such comments as ‘Error’ or ‘Insufficient data’ on its screen.

  Ritchie was battering at the door of the clubroom. ‘Come out, you diffy gowk,’ he roared. ‘By God, Fiddler, I’ll lib you with a rusty gullie when I catch hold of you.’ And more, much more, to similar effect.

  Keith must have found an acceptable formula. Honour satisfied, the computer suddenly relented and began on a list of car-owning Batemores. Keith watched in fascination.

  *

  Ronnie had departed, without, in fact, broaching any of the bottles. Keith and Sergeant Ritchie were left to make their way out through the builders’ workings. Keith pacified Ritchie at last and walked down to the square. He was very tired and the sight of the Land Rover waiting outside the shop was tempting, but he made his way inside.

  Wallace was alone in the shop, patiently re-arranging stock in preparation for the next rush of customers. He fetched a chair for Keith. ‘Minnie didn’t recognize anybody in the photographs,’ he said.